Special Master Blaster

 

 

 by Jeffrey St. Clair

+ Although it’s allegedly a cherished constitutional right, few people brought to trial on criminal charges in the US ever truly face a “jury of their peers.” Usually, they’re confronting a jury of the prosecution’s peers. For example, even though 45% of Americans oppose the death penalty under any circumstances, those people are automatically excluded from hearing death penalty cases. So the system is rigged to favor a pre-determined result. It is, of course, almost unheard of that a defendant (or the subject of an investigation) would face a judge of his peers– never mind a judge he has put on the bench and hand-picked to hear his case. But that is exactly the situation playing out in the Trump document theft case. There are multiple levels of impunity encoded into our justice system, where the master criminals, the ones who kill, rob and steal the most, those who exploit their positions in government or business for their  own enrichment, are forever shielded from popular justice, while the poor and the powerless remain at the mercy of a system that is designed to keep them in a state of perpetual obedience.

+ The real American exceptionalism, the systemic rot at the core of the Republic, has long been that the people who write, enforce and judge of the laws of the country are the least likely to be held accountable to them, especially when they achieve ranks of power where they’re required to take an oath to uphold them.

+ I’m all for strictly limiting the power of the state to search your house and seize your property, as long as it’s a right enjoyed by all of us. But when has a special master ever been convened in a drug asset seizure case, where police departments have sold off houses, jewelry, boats, and cars–even before people have been convicted of crimes? There is no right to an attorney in these proceedings, which often target low-income people who exist in a cash economy. The legal standard for confiscating your entire bank account is not “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but merely a “preponderance of the evidence.” This kind of “policing for profit” happens all the time up and down the criminal justice system, from local town cops to the federal Dept. of Justice itself, which prepared a memo in 1990 saying, “We must significantly increase forfeiture production to reach our budget target. Every effort must be made to increase forfeiture income.”

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